Persecution

RUSSELL SHAW

6/03/15

The persecution of the Catholic Church and other morally
conservative religious bodies has begun in the United States.
As predicted, it isn't - thank God - bloody persecution like
the persecution of Christians in many countries. But it's
real persecution and likely to get worse.

This new persecution currently has two prongs.

One consists of pressuring individual religious believers to
cooperate with public policies inimical to faith. The other
prong is pressure targeted at religious groups and
institutions to adapt their programs to the promotion of
values hostile to the sponsors' moral convictions.

When and if the Supreme Court announces its discovery of a
constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it will be taking
a giant step in both directions and paving the way for more.
As we saw in Indiana earlier this year, efforts to protect
the right of conscientious objection to the radical
redefinition of marriage will come under even fiercer assault

Perhaps Indiana's religious freedom law did need tweaking,
but the opponents would have preferred no law at all. For
them, simply legalizing gay marriage isn't enough. Dissent
must be stamped out.

Consider the case of the Oregon couple, Christian owners of a
bakery (now closed), who recently were held liable for
$135,000 in damages for declining to bake a wedding cake for
a lesbian couple. They did nothing to prevent the lesbians
from marrying - their offense was not wanting to lend a hand
to the celebration.

As for the second prong of persecution - pressure to adapt
religious programs and institutions to the promotion of
hostile values, coupled with vitriolic denunciations of
whoever says "no" to doing that - it has been visibly in
operation lately in San Francisco, where Archbishop Salvatore
Cordileone came under attack for saying that teachers in
Catholic schools shouldn't teach things contrary to Catholic
morality.

This is astonishing. Why on earth should the Catholic Church,
in its own schools, be obliged to provide a platform for
teaching that contradicts Catholic moral doctrine? Yet this
is what Archbishop Cordileone's critics, including San
Francisco media, would require of the church.

Sad to say, the hue and cry was taken up by some Catholics,
who went so far as to publish a paid newspaper advertisement
calling for Archbishop Cordileone's removal from office. It
is said that Lenin spoke of Western academics and journalists
who heaped praise on the Bolshevik Revolution as "useful
idiots." The Catholic Church has its share of those.

In a talk several weeks ago to seminarians of his
archdiocese, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput pointed
to the driving force that lies behind the new persecution: a
radical collapse of moral consensus, reflected in a
disastrous breakdown of public moral discourse.

"The biggest problem we face as a culture," Archbishop Chaput
said, "isn't gay marriage or global warming. It's not
abortion funding or the federal debt. The deeper
problem, the one that's crippling us, is that we use words
like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any
commonly shared meaning. Our most important debates
boil out to who can deploy the best words in the best way to
get power."

Speaking in April to a pro-choice group, Hillary Clinton said
religious views opposed to abortion "have to be changed." In
fairness, it must be said that Mrs. Clinton wasn't urging
persecution but persuasion. But who doubts that accompanying
the persuasion would be laws, regulations and court orders?
That is precisely the "form soft" that persecution by the
nanny-state takes these days.

Hang on to your hats. The worst of it has yet to come.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author
of American Church: The Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall,
and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America (Ignatius
Press).